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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Born on August 25, 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois, Dorothea Tanning studied at Knox College in her hometown before moving to Chicago to pursue painting at the Art Institute.

Her collections of poetry include Coming to That (Graywolf, 2011) and A Table of Content (2004). She is also the author of two memoirs, Birthday (1986) and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (2001); and a novel, Chasm (2004).

After discovering Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, Tanning began working as a painter in New York. As she recounts in her memoirs, when the famed German artist Max Ernst visited her studio in 1942, they played chess, fell in love, and embarked on a life together that soon took them to Sedona, Arizona, and later to Paris and provincial France. She married Ernst in 1946 in a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet Browner.

About her work, Barry Schwabsky, writing for The Nation has said:

As with everything else [Tanning] has turned her hand to, she's made poetry her own...I've never met her, but simply knowing of her existence expands my sense of the possible in art and life.

Her paintings and sculptures are included in major museum collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de la Ville de Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Art Institute, among others.

No Palms

Dorothea Tanning, 1910 - 2012

No palms dolled up the tedium, no breathing wind.
No problem was the buzzword then, their way to go.
In truth, my case was black as sin, a thing to hide,
In that they feigned to find me sane, so not to know.
Someone brought in a medium. Anathema!
Some clown sewed up my eyes, he said it wouldn't show.
Confusing hands with craze, they howled, "Let's cut them off."
Confusing, too, their spies, my lies without an echo.
Time and again they stitched my mind with warp and woof.
Time pounded in my ruby heart, doing a slow,
Slow dim-out in that lupanar, slow take, slow fade,
Slow yawning like a door. "Hello," I said. "HELLO."
There, flung across the room between inside and out,
There must have shown itself to me. . .an afterglow.
With such a blaze to celebrate where centuries meet
With time itself, how could I hesitate? Although
Still trapped in the millennium I knew I had
Still time to blow some kisses. Look up, there they go!

Dorothea Tanning

by this poet

Now that legal tender has
lost its tenderness,
and its very legality
is so often in question,
it may be time to consider
the zero—
long rows of them,
empty, black circles in clumps
of three,
presided over by a numeral
or two.

"If it comes to that," he said, "there'll be no
preventing it."
He uttered it as I listened. Had I got it right,
hearing him?
"If it comes to that," is what he said, and,
as if talking
to himself, went on about how there'd be no
preventing it.
He came to that conclusion, saying it in a
slow way of
coming to that

If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal
itself for what it is, what we all burn to know.
As for our certainties, it would fetch a dry yawn
then take a minute to sweep them under the rug:
certainties time-honored as meaningless as dust
under the rug. High time, my dears, to listen up.
Finally Art